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"Remember, democracy never lasts long.
It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.
There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
John Adams
(1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President

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3/14/2007

The Descent of the US; the Rise of Latin America

The Descent of the US; the Rise of Latin America

By PHILIP AGEE

Havana.

Anyone following the news in recent times cannot be unaware of the wave of
progressive change sweeping Latin America and the Caribbean. For many lonely years
Cuba held high the torch through its exemplary programs to provide universal health
care and education, both gratis, along with world class cultural, sports and
scientific achievements. Although you won´t find a Cuban today who says things
are perfect, far from it, probably all would agree that compared with
pre-revolutionary Cuba there is a world of improvement. All this they did against
every effort by the United States to isolate them as an unacceptable example of
independence and self-determination, using every dirty method including infiltration,
sabotage, terrorism, assassination, economic and biological warfare and incessant
lies in the cooperating media of many countries. I know these methods too well,
having been a CIA officer in Latin America in the 1960´s. Altogether nearly
3500 Cubans have died from terrorist acts, and more than 2000 are permanently
disabled. No country has suffered terrorism as long and consistently as Cuba.

All through the years, beginning even before taking power in 1959, the Cuban
revolution has needed to have intelligence collection capabilities in the U.S. for
defensive purposes. Such was the fully justified mission of the Cuban Five, jailed
since 1998 with long sentences after conviction for various crimes in Miami where
they had no chance for a fair trial. Convictions were for conspiracy to commit
espionage to murder. Nevertheless their sights were exclusively set on criminal
terrorist planning in Miami for operations against Cuba, activities ignored by the
FBI and other law enforcement agencies. They neither sought nor received any
classified U.S. government information. Their cases are still on appeal, and will be
for years to come, but their completely biased convictions rank with the legal
lynching in the 1920's of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchist
immigrants, as among the most shameful injustices in U.S. history. Freedom for the
Cuban Five should be the cause of everyone for whom fairness, human rights and
justice are important, both in the United States and around the world, joining in the
activities of the 300 Free the Five solidarity committees in 90 countries.

Current U.S. policy with its means and goals can be found in the nearly 500-page
2004 report of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba together with an update
published in 2006 that has a secret annex. A fundamental goal, the same in 2007 as I
remember it was in 1959, is isolation of Cuba to keep this bad example from
spreading, and the current policy if successful, would mean no less than Cuban
annexation to the U.S. and complete dependence, in fact if not in law, as Cubans
rightfully claim. Other fundamental goals from 1959 are still, nearly 50 years later,
to foment an internal political opposition and to cause economic hardship in Cuba
leading to desperation, hunger and despair. It is no exaggeration to call these goals
genocidal.

Yet, U.S. economic warfare of nearly 50 years against Cuba hasn't worked even
though the Cubans who keep book estimate its cost at more than $80 billion. After the
Cuban economy's free fall in the early 1990's, with the collapse of the Soviet Union,
it began to recover in 1995. By 2005 growth was 11.8% and in 2006 it was 12.5%, the
highest in Latin America. Some sectors have surpassed their development levels of the
late 80's, before the collapse, and others are nearly back. Cuba's exports of
services, nickel, pharmaceutical and other products are booming, and try as it may,
the U.S. has not been able to stop this.

In the end U.S. efforts to isolate Cuba have also totally failed. In September
2006 Cuba was elected, for the second time, to lead the Non-Aligned Movement of 118
countries, and two months later, for the 15th consecutive year, the United Nations
General Assembly voted to condemn the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba, this time 183 to
4. In 2007 Cuba has diplomatic or consular relations with 182 countries. Havana
meanwhile is the site of seemingly endless international conferences on every
imaginable theme with thousands of people from around the world attending. And not
least, Cuba in recent years has been hosting more than 2 million foreign tourists
annually at its world-class resorts. Far from isolating Cuba, the U.S. has isolated
itself.

More than 30,000 Cuban doctors and health workers are saving lives and preventing
disease in 69 countries, many in the most remote and difficult areas where few or no
local doctors will go. Meanwhile 30,000 young foreigners from dozens of countries are
studying medicine in Cuba on full scholarships. All were selected from areas lacking
doctors, and all are committed to return to these areas in their home countries to
practice.

In education the Cuban literacy program known as "Yes I can" has been adopted in
nearly 30 countries on five continents where thousands more Cuban volunteers are
teaching. Through this program, in Spanish, Portuguese, English, Creole, Quechua and
Aymara, some 2 million people have learned to read and write, most of whom continue
their education afterwards through a variety of other programs.

Thanks to these international assistance programs, Cuban prestige and influence,
and international solidarity with Cuba, have never been greater. It was to defend
these worthy programs that the five Cubans, unjustly convicted, went to Miami in the
1990's.

Then in 1999 came Hugo Chavez, the U.S.'s latest worst nightmare in the region,
admittedly following the Cuban example in Venezuela, with its enormous income from
petroleum, to establish what he calls a Socialism for the 21st Century with a foreign
policy of regional integration under his innovative Bolivarian Alternative for the
Americas, ALBA, excluding the United States altogether. The program is already
underway through institutions such as Mercosur in trade, Petrocaribe, Petroandino and
Petrosur in the energy sector, the Banco del Sur in finance, and Telesur in
electronic media.

Another program under ALBA is Operación Milagro (Operation Miracle)
for offering free eye surgery to people unable to afford it for cataracts, glaucoma,
diabetes and other vision problems. It began in 2004 as a joint Cuban-Venezuelan
effort to bring Venezuelans by air to Cuba cost free for operations. Within two years
28 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean were participating, and operations
restoring sight numbered 485,000 of whom 290,000 were Venezuelans. Jet liners loaded
with patients come and go from Havana everyday, but by early 2007 thirteen modern eye
clinics were being built in Venezuela, and several had already performed thousands of
operations there. Other clinics were being established in Bolivia, Ecuador,
Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti, all with Cuban planning and staffing. The ten-year
goal of Operación Milagro is to restore sight to 6 million people of
Latin America and the Caribbean, and the program is expanding to Africa.

The Cuban example of so many years, and now Venezuela, have also recently inspired
the peoples of Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Nicaragua to elect
progressive leaders. Most have rejected the 1990´s "Washington Consensus" and
the neo-liberal model along with determined U.S. efforts to establish a hemispheric
free trade zone. All are developing grassroots social and economic programs, each in
its own way, aimed at improving the quality of life for all, especially the
long-excluded majorities of their populations where this injustice prevailed.
Although achievements in Cuba continue to shine, the torch of revolution in the
region has effectively passed from the towering figure of Fidel, ailing at eighty, to
Chavez, a military man and teacher inspired by Simón Bolívar and
José Martí.

Reflecting on these new hopes for hundreds of millions in such a vast region, one
cannot avoid recalling the old professor, Próspero, addressing his class for
the last time in Ariel, the classic essay by José Enrique Rodó,
still read by students in Latin America. In borrowing from The Tempest, and
urging his students to follow the soaring spirit of virtue and good, represented by
Ariel, and to reject the crass materialism of the U.S. personified by Calibán,
Próspero drew a contrast between Latin American idealism and the United States
that is as valid today as in 1900 when the essay first appeared.

While Latin America is fast moving in progressive directions, almost unimaginable
less than ten years ago, in contrast the United States, at least since the Reagan
era, has been moving step by step toward a Fascism for the 21st Century. And the pace
has quickened in the last six years of Republican government under George W. Bush
with passage of the Patriot Act under emergency circumstances just after the attacks
on the Twin Towers in September 2001, and then adoption in 2006 of the Military
Commissions Act, both with substantial support from Congressional Democrats. Other
legislation supports this trend.

The U.S. Federal Government now has legal powers to secretly monitor one´s
communications, whether by telephone, ordinary mail, e-mail, or fax, plus your bank
accounts, credit cards, the web sites you visit, and the books you buy or read in
libraries. Torture, secret prisons, kidnapping, and jailing indefinitely without
trial or recourse to courts through habeas corpus---all are now legal. So is
"extraordinary rendition" whereby U.S. captives are delivered to other governments
where they will likely be tortured and possibly assassinated. Investigations by the
European Parliament have identified around 1200 secret CIA flights carrying these
people through European airports to secret prisons. To qualify for this treatment,
anyone in the world, U.S. citizens and any others, only need be designated by the
government as an "illegal enemy combatant" whose only definition is someone who has
"purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States."
Hostilities or a hostile act can be interpreted as almost anything that opposes U.S.
policies, from a speech expressing solidarity with Cuba to a picket line protesting
the war in Iraq. If an "enemy combatant" ever gets a trial, it will not be by a jury
of peers but by a U.S. military court that can use hearsay and evidence obtained
under torture.

These powers reminiscent of the Nazi regime are not just a global U.S Sword of
Damocles waiting to fall on perceived enemies. The full range of repression has been
going on since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 with plenty of evidence coming
from the prisons and concentration camps of Bagram, Abu Graib and Guantánamo
as well as from testimony of various released innocents swept up in the process. It
is an on-going worldwide application of fascist power in a non-defined, nebulous "war
on terrorism" that has no end or geographical limits. Since September 2001 the Bush
government has given one specious reason after another for what it believes are the
motives of Islamic terrorism, never admitting that it is a reaction and resistance to
U.S. imperial policies, starting with U.S. support for Israel's continued occupation
and colonization of Arab lands and Israel's refusal to return to its borders before
the Six-Day War in 1967.

By 2006 the U.S. had designated some 17,000 people around the world as "enemy
combatants," according to press reports. Combine this repression with gargantuan
contracts to private U.S. firms, as in Iraqi security and "reconstruction," along
with forcing the Iraqi government, always with eyes on the prize, to contract highly
prejudicial 30-year "production sharing agreements" to American and British oil
majors, excluded from Iraq before the invasion, plus historic lows in trade union
power, and you have the marriage of government and corporate power that Mussolini,
who invented the word in 1919, described as the essence of fascism. The one bright
spot are the recent indictments of 13 CIA people in Germany and 26 others in Italy
for kidnapping and other violations of their laws. They will never be brought to
trial, of course, but the indictments are refreshing developments.

Protection of terrorists who serve U.S. interests is still another feature of
American Fascism of the 21st Century. There are many examples, especially among Cuban
exiles, but two stand out from the others: Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles.
Both have long, well-documented pedigrees as international terrorists, but one of
their joint crimes was historic: the first bombing in flight of a civilian airliner
in the Western Hemisphere. It was Cubana flight 455 that on October 6th, 1976
exploded just after takeoff from Barbados killing all 73 people on board.

Bosch and Carriles, both of whose CIA careers began around 1960, planned the
bombing in Caracas and provided the explosives to two Venezuelans recruited by
Posada. These two were discovered, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms. Not
so with Bosch and Posada who were protected by then-Venezuelan President Carlos
Andrés Pérez who has his own history of working with the CIA. Although
they were both arrested and tried separately in Venezuelan courts as the intellectual
authors of the crime, neither was convicted.

Bosch was found not guilty and released in 1988, returned to Miami but was
arrested for an old parole violation. The Justice Department then ordered his
deportation as an "undesirable" and as "the most dangerous terrorist" of the Western
Hemisphere. But Jeb Bush, son of then-President Bush, persuaded his father in 1990 to
quash Bosch´s deportation order. Since then Bosch has lived freely in Miami
where he gives television interviews in which he makes every effort to justify
terrorism against Cuba.

For his part Posada´s trial in Venezuela never ended because in 1985 he
escaped from prison, fled the country, and soon turned up in El Salvador working in
the CIA´s Contra terrorist operation against Nicaragua. When this ended he
stayed underground in Central America and from the early 1990´s organized more
terrorist operations against Cuba. In 2005 he was arrested in Miami for illegal entry
to the U.S., and although he admitted to the New York Times to terrorist bombings of
hotels and other tourist facilities in Cuba, in one of which an Italian tourist died,
he has only been indicted for lying to the FBI and in his request for naturalization.
The Bush administration refuses to certify him as a terrorist so that he can be tried
as such, at the same time ignoring Venezuela's extradition request as a fugitive from
justice, alleging absurdly that he might be tortured there. His treatment suggests
that he will eventually be pardoned by Bush, perhaps on Christmas Eve of 2008 just
before leaving the White House, just as his father on Christmas Eve of 1992 pardoned
former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and various CIA officers for crimes in the
1980´s Iran-Contra scandal, thus precluding their trials scheduled to begin the
following month.

One need not dwell on the obvious. The conviction of the Miami Cuban Five for
their anti-terrorist efforts, in contrast with the official protection of terrorists
like Bosch and Posada, speaks volumes on the U.S. as the pre-eminent state sponsor of
international terrorism.

The major disguise used to cloak this U.S. program of worldwide aggression from
the 1980´s to the present has been "promotion of democracy," a hypocritical
claim used adnauseum by Presidents, Secretaries of State and others
that has never fooled anyone. It has always been clear that the "democracy promotion"
programs of the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department, the Agency
for International Development and associated foundations and agencies are nothing
more that attempts to foment and strengthen internal political forces in countries
around the world that will be under U.S. control and will protect and cater to U.S.
interests. Their origins are in the CIA's political operations starting in the
1940´s, and they have included the overthrow of democratically elected
governments and the institution of unspeakable repression as in Brazil in 1964 and
Chile in 1973 to name only two of many examples.

To be sure there has been, and is, important and worthy resistance in the U.S. to
this developing fascism both within Congress and among private organizations and
individuals. But it has been mostly isolated attempts of a defensive and rear-guard
nature, with little mention in the corporate media. Bills have been introduced in
Congress to ease or end the economic blockade of Cuba, to amend the worst of the
repressive laws, even to impeach Bush and Cheney, but they seem unlikely ever to
prevail or become law. The two parties, actually competing branches of a one-party
state, have simply adopted ever more extreme measures to maintain their monopoly of
power.

Even the judicial system, once perhaps the last hope for enforcing the
Constitution, has been riddled with neo-conservatives who ignore it. Take only the
appeal of the Miami conviction by the Cuban Five. The original three appellate judges
of Atlanta´s 11th Circuit issued a compelling 93-page unanimous decision
upholding the defense position that no fair trial of self-admitted Cuban agents was
possible in Miami´s prevailing anti-Cuban atmosphere and that the trial venue
should have been moved. Nevertheless the other 10 judges of the Circuit voted to hear
another appeal en banc and then unanimously overturned the first decision with
only two of the original three judges voting against (the third had retired). That 10
of the 13 Circuit Court judges would uphold Miami as a place where Cuban agents could
get a fair trial is a good example of how morally and intellectually corrupt the
federal judiciary has become.

So these are grim days indeed for the United States and by extension for its
allies, starting with its junior partner, the U.K., and extending through NATO. There
have been other periods of shameful repression in the U.S., like the years following
World War I, but never with a global reach like this.

Predictably U.S. prestige around the world, what there ever was of it, has
disappeared, replaced by contempt and scorn. Testimony to this is the repudiation of
Bush and what he stands for expressed by so many thousands in the streets protesting
his presence as he traveled around Latin America attempting to lure five countries
away from regional integration. What a contrast with the enlightened, idealistic, and
progressive social and political movements now flowering in Latin America!

Philip Agee, 72, was a CIA secret operations officer in Latin American from
1960 to 1969. He is the author of the best-selling Inside the Company: CIA Diary
(Penguin Books, 1975) plus other books and articles. Deported in 1977 by the U.K and
four other NATO countries, he has lived since 1978 with his wife in Hamburg, Germany.
He travels frequently to Cuba and South America for solidarity and business
activities, and in 2000 he started an online travel service to Cuba: www.cubalinda.com.